Shadowy Super-Coders - The Daily Gwei #301
Super spooky shadowy super-coders lurking in the night.
A couple of days ago U.S Senator Elizabeth Warren made headlines for her aggressive stance on cryptocurrencies - namely, that she isn’t a fan of them (and would probably have them outright banned if she had it her way). She made one statement in particular that caught the attention of crypto twitter:
“Instead of leaving our financial system at the whims of giant banks, crypto puts the system at the whims of some shadowy, faceless group of super-coders and miners, which doesn’t sound better to me.”
The use of the term ‘shadowy super-coder’ instantly became a meme and Elizabeth was endlessly mocked over this term - and rightfully so - implying that Ethereum developers aren’t any better than the actors in the existing financial system is disingenuous at best.
No matter what region of the world you look to, it’s clear to see that most politicians are completely out of touch when it comes to cryptocurrencies. They either have a very limited understanding of it, dislike it because it has a chance of disrupting the status quo (namely banks) or simply have an irrational dislike towards it. Of course, it’s only natural for those that are part of an establishment to kick and scream when said establishment is being disrupted - but these politicians are elected representatives of the people and they should act in the best interests of these people. Without getting too political, I’d argue that it’s in the U.S’ best interest to fund and encourage innovation of the entire crypto industry or else they risk losing the immense economic growth that it generates to other countries.
So how do we fix this? Well, I don’t really think there’s an easy path here nor do I think that it’s something that can be “fixed”. It comes back to the age-old question - how do you get someone to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it? In most politicians cases, their salary (and investments) are tied to the “traditional” or “old” world that crypto seeks to disrupt - so why would they want to promote that? It’d be like asking us crypto-native folk to promote banks, large financial institutions and centralization in general - it’s just not in our best interests to do this. Though I would at least like to see more educated takes on our industry from politicians - at least then we could have some rational discourse.
In saying all of this, there are some politicians that are on crypto’s side (after all, we had El Salvador adopt BTC as legal tender recently). Though unfortunately these people are few and far between and some of them are probably just saying they like crypto to pander to a base. On the flip side, what if we had crpyto-natives become politicians? Well I’d wager that there are very few people who are into crypto and interested in going into politics because they’d probably rather start their own crypto company or work in crypto (as that is a much better use of their time and is much more rewarding). So, at best, we just generally need to work to fund the existing lobbying efforts (such as Coin Center and others) to at least attempt to educate these politicians so they can make informed decisions that promote a healthy crypto-ecosystem.
As I wrote about the other day, for our industry to be truly unstoppable, we need to decentralize the entire stack - developers need to be anon, pseudo-anon or based in crypto-friendly jurisdictions, we need projects to all become DAOs (or start out as DAOs), front-end interfaces need to decentralize and we need to create a circular crypto-economy (because the regulators will eventually choke the fiat on/off ramps).
Until we do all of that, I don’t think we can call ourselves truly decentralized.
Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano
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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.